


Spot Conlon's Christmas

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Canon Era, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 05:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17196995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Spot decides to make the holidays memorable for his boys.





	Spot Conlon's Christmas

Spot Conlon just about never slept at the Newsboys’ Lodging House on Poplar Street. It wasn’t a bad joint all things considered, and it was a hell of a lot roomier and more modern than anything he’d seen outside of Brooklyn, but hanging around there wasn’t his style. There were too many rules, and the matron, Mrs. Kirby, was a fine lady, but the kids liked her too much. Spot didn’t want to put them in the position of trying to decide whether they’d obey her or him when push came to shove. It was better to let them think all the important folks they knew were cahoots, because a lot of them were still little kids, and filling their heads up with doubts and questions was liable to fry the brains that they were still only beginning to figure out how to use.

Spot didn’t need much from them, anyhow. He just needed to know that they’d be willing to jump to his beck and call, assuming he ever had reason to call or beck. Without a good leader, after all, Brooklyn would be a mess like Manhattan. It wasn’t like anybody else was clamoring to take over the position. Least of all not any fella who’d be able to handle the commitment.

And commitment was what it boiled down to. Commitment and smarts, and knowing that you had to stick your head into the lodge and spend a night there every once in a while, even if you had a better place to sleep, and even if the clean cold air of late December wasn’t enough to keep sixty-eight street kids (Spot had done a headcount) from stinking up the room.

They’d welcomed Spot in, of course. They saved a bed for him all the time. Birdie, who Spot had taught how not to lose at marbles a while back, had four real nice shooters to show him. Croaker offered him a newspaper on the house, not that that was much, but it was all a kid like him had, and Spot could appreciate that. Downstairs in the lobby, he’d had to take off his hat, greet Mrs. Kirby politely, and sign in just like any other boy. Up here in the dormitory, though, he was just as much a king as he was anywhere else in the city.

It took the boys a long while to get settled. A poor night’s sleep was part and parcel with staying at the lodge. They tried to stay quiet when Spot decided it was time for bed, but for a lot of them, quiet just wasn’t in their nature, and Spot decided not to press it. Letting them talk meant that he got to listen, and that was never a bad thing.

“Do you think they’ll make up the money for Christmas?” One little voice whispered, below Spot and about three beds away. That was Benjamin One, who was the oldest of the Benjamin twins by an entire three minutes, so the story went. He shared a bed with his brother, Benjamin Two. Benjamin Two had a freckle next to his left eye, and he was the quieter of the twins. Benjamin Two’s given name was Thomas Anthony, not that many people knew that, or even cared to.

Benjamin Two was the next to speak.

“They gotta,” he said, with the complete faith of a child who hadn’t been on the streets long. “They put out an ad in the paper.”

Spot had seen this add, of course. It had been printed in the Brooklyn Eagle just that morning, and read: _We are planning a merry Christmas for the children under our care in the Shelter, in boarding homes and in the Newsboys’ Home. They are to have a Santa Claus, tree, candy, books, clothing, entertainments, a generous dinner and, in short, a fine time._

“Why you think they had to put out an add in the paper to make up the cash to pay for a Santa Claus?” Benjamin One asked. “Don’t he come for free to all good girls and boys?”

“Ain’t no such thing as Santa Claus,” whispered Biceps O’Keefe, who was seventeen years old, and had a mean streak.

“There is too,” a fourth voice piped up. Spot didn’t know this kid. He’d have to rectify that. “It’s been verified in print, they wrote an expository on it in the Sun. You can trust me to keep on top of any scraps of news worth reading. He exists and I’ll show you the article to prove it soon as it’s light out.”

“So why don’t he ever come here, huh?” Asked Biceps. “And I’m not talking about those goons they pays to dress up every year, neither.”

“They don’t pay ‘em,” whispered Dolly, who’d gotten his name on account of he was pretty enough to be a girl, and a bit of a dandy to boot. “They’s volunteers.”

“Yeah, well last year’s stunk of whiskey, and gave me a pair of shoes that don’t fit and a picture book like the kind mamas read aloud to their babies while they’s still toothless and sucking on their dugs,” said Biceps. Biceps knew nothing about mamas, but Spot guessed he knew something about whiskey, considering his pop had died from drinking too much of it, and Biceps seemed like he was heading there himself.

“Just cause that guy ain’t the real Santa, doesn’t mean there ain’t no such guy,” said the kid that Spot didn’t know. “He exists, see, but he only comes to _good_ children. Ain’t a man among us is entirely virtuous. We all lie to sell headlines, and most of us smokes. If we learned how to behave proper then Santa would come, sure as snow.”

“I don’t think we’s any worse than we hafta be,” said Benjamin One. “So maybe I stole an apple the other day, but I don’t think it’s fair to say we’re any worse than the rich kids in their pretty houses, just ‘cause some of us knows what it is to be hungry.”

“Says the rich kid who burned down his pretty house,” laughed Biceps.

“Did not!”

“Somebody had to of, else you’d still be living in it.”

“I don’t think life _is_ fair,” said the mystery kid, with a hint of pensiveness.

That seemed to settle the matter. “Finally something we all can agree on,” grumbled Biceps. Spot heard the covers rustle, as he turned over in the night.

Things got real quiet after that. Spot could hear that one of the Benjamins had started to tell a bedtime story to the other, but his words were so quiet that Spot could only make out enough of the tale to know that it was about gingerbread, and that it wasn’t very important to anyone but the pair of bothers. It wasn’t long before Spot fell asleep. It was, however, a very long time indeed before he stopped running the night’s conversation around in his mind.

——-

It didn’t bother Spot much that some of the lodgers at Poplar street thought that they were bad kids. Good and bad were relevant, sure, but most of them weren’t angels and didn’t aspire to be. Spot certainly didn’t want to be any kind of angel, unless he got to be a monstrous and terrible archangel who struck fear into the hearts of man, and who everyone listened to and obeyed. Spot was more concerned with power than goodness when it came down to it, but he also hated the idea of any of his boys feeling unworthy of getting some pleasure out of life, just because they weren’t saintly. Maybe his own family had treated him like that, not that _they_ were worth much of anything. Maybe society tried to treat homeless street kids like that, because if they just worked a little harder and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps like Americans were supposed to, they’d all magically stop being vagrants and criminals and start being pillars of society.

Maybe, when it came down to it, society wasn’t worth what a pig could fart. That was Spot’s excuse for heading over Manhattan, which wasn’t a society, so much as a rabble of loud and boisterous idiots.

“Well lookie here,” Racetrack Higgins said around his cigar, as Spot sauntered into the Manhattan lodging house on Duane Street.

“Not a bad idea, seein’ as I’m the only thing worth seein’ round these parts.”

Spot took a seat on one of the empty beds. Across from him, Sniper was in the process of braiding back her long brown hair, which she always kept piled under her cap and out of the way.

“Guy’s got a point,” she said with a wink at him. “He’s better to look at than you is, anyhow.” She stared straight at Race for a minute after she said it, in a way that let Spot know she wasn’t trying to flirt with him, so much as trying to rile up her friend. It worked too. Racetrack threw a sock at her head.

“Here on business?” Jack guessed. Jack Kelly was the kind of guy who had brains, but only some of the time. Mostly he just had a bleeding heart, and a surprisingly keen understanding of people and what they wanted to hear, which came in handy some of the time.

“I need red clothes,” Spot said, deciding to cut to the chase. “All you got.”

“I’ve got a pair of pink suspenders, but you’ll have to win ‘em in a round of poker,” Racetrack offered. “Not that they’d look good with your… Erm… _Physique_ anyways.” He cackled as if he’d just made the best joke ever heard.

“You ain’t getting my red earrings,” Sniper said hotly.

“You’re ears ain’t even pierced,” one of the boys pointed out, to which Specs and Jack both responded hotly and damn well near simultaneously that Sniper’s earrings were nobody’s business but her own.

“Earrings ain’t my style,” Spot assured her, and anybody else who might be concerned with the state of Sniper’s jewelry. “‘Sides, I was looking for something more… Woolen. You know. Maybe with fluffy white bits ‘round the edges. Or somethin long those lines.“

"My scarf’s red,” Crutchie offered, “So’s one of my mittens, but the other is black. And lost. But I do got one red mitten and one red scarf, if that helps.”

“You need your scarf!” Jack protested. Crutchie was already rummaging for the aforementioned items. “He needs his scarf,” Jack said again, this time to Spot.

Spot was saved from having to answer, because at that moment Romeo walked into the lodging house, wearing a faded red hat, with an only slightly stained white pop pom adorning the top of it.

“That’s what I need!” Spot Conlon exclaimed inelegantly, rushing towards the smaller boy.

——

“You could’ve just told us you wanted to dress up as Saint Nicholas to make the boys happy,” Crutchie whispered, as they snuck through the quiet hallways of the Duane Street Lodging House. He needn’t have bothered. The sound of his crutch clamoring against the wooden floor was making plenty of noise on its own. Besides Crutchie, Romeo and Jack were Spots other partners on this super secret mission, and Jack was the only one who knew how to keep quiet. Romeo kept giggling.

That’s sort how Spot figured out that stealth wasn’t quite as important as they were pretending it was.

“I’m not dressing up as him to make them happy,” Spot whispered back. “I’m tryin’ to prove a point.”

“Davey would say you’re trying to overthrow the system,” Jack said.

“I _am_ the system.”

Romeo snorted, and the only thing that kept Spot from hitting him was that he might be needing his hat later.

It was then that the three of them made it to the closet. Romeo picked the lock, and they threw the door open.

Inside it was the most moth eaten Santa suit Spot had ever seen.

“So the old man won’t miss it?” Spot asked, just to be sure, a Santa outfit wasn’t worth having some decrepit old geezer call the bulls on him, or nothing like that.

“That’s part of _our_ plan,” said Romeo.

“Quiet!” Jack warned.

“Just wanna let our resident monarch know that we’s got plans too.”

“We all know that Kloppman plays Santa for us every year,” Crutchie explained enthusiastically. “So this year, when he opens the door to get his suit out, he’s gonna find the closet all full up with gifts instead.”

“It’ll be a big surprise, unless he’s listening, in which case the cat’s outta the bag’,” Jack said, nudging Crutchie.

Spot was more concerned about another issue.

“How’s you gonna pay for all the gifts to fill the closet up?” He asked.

Crutchie broke into the biggest grin ever. “Boy,” he said, “have I got news for you.”

——-

It turned out that Crutchie’s news was that he knew a cookie seller who’d received a shipment of slightly off gingerbread cookies, and was trying to pass them off to anybody who would be willing to pay a little for them. It was exactly what Spot needed. You couldn’t be Santa without gifts, and the cookies were just cheap enough that Spot was able to buy it one for each boy at the lodge, without seriously dipping into his savings.

Christmas night came, and Spot, clad in his new costume, waited in the lodging house dormitories for the evening’s festivities to be over. Sure enough, at around nine o’clock, the boys started to filter in, already in good spirits from the fine night they’d had, and more than ready to let Spot’s outfit fill them with even more holiday joy.

As a leader, Spot was the sort to believe that it was better to be feared than loved, even if he aspired to be both. Santa Claus, however, was under no such obligations, and was very free with praise and encouragement for the boys, far sweeter than the stale cookies he had to offer.

As the years passed, nobody in Brooklyn ever discovered that their brief encounter with jolly old Saint Nick had also been an encounter with their own fearless leader. However, every one of them did remember that Christmas as a magical night.


End file.
